Originally posted by Plastique_synthetiX:
Don't knock 4 cyl. performance... many of the world's fastest and best handling cars are 4 bangers.... The quickest (0 to 60) street legal (stock) car is a four cylinder.
What car is that? I assume you're not talking about something like a Lamborghini Diablo, which as I recall has about 26 cylinders.
The Zetec is a pretty wonderful engine, in theory, but sometimes the manufacturing isn't perfect. All in all, though, the one major thing wrong with our Zetecs is just that the car they're put into is too heavy.
The future was supposed to bring us lighter and more efficient cars, but instead what we're getting is that even small cars keep getting heavier. The Focus is way heavy for its size, and so are lots of other compacts. For instance, the New Beetle is 500 lbs heavier than the traditional one. The old Ford Pinto was a bulky and wasteful design for a compact by modern standards, but it weighed less than any Escort. A Miata weighs way more than the old English roadsters it imitates. Etc.
The weights of some SUVs are beyond insane. For a Toyota Land Cruiser to weigh 6000 lbs -- considerably more than the old GMC Suburban despite being smaller -- makes sense if it's a serious off-road vehicle, but is it really made for that purpose any more?
Saturn has shown that you can make a moderately sizeable modern car a good deal lighter, but nobody else is following the lead very much... it would require a bigger budget than buying enough senators to kill a mileage bill took.
I want to see me one of them Fisher Fury roadsters. Same engine as my tour in a car that weighs half as much.
